inward, delighted smile at the memory of her enchanted evening with the dashing, handsome inspector and former colonel. He proved to be a caring, kind, gentle man. When she'd brought up his children he had gone into a kind of beatific reverie, speaking of their beautiful faces, moments of happiness snatched with them between job and visitations. He had nicknames for the two girls, Pixie-snow and Pixie-cream, he called them. “Enchanting creatures, both with diametrically opposed personalities. Neither of them are the least like me. Sweet, the two of them. Bloody treacherous we have to bring such innocence into this world.”
She hadn't pried into the causes of his breakup with his wife. She could imagine the underlying reasons, what had caused the underpinnings of the relationship to be removed. Most likely his story would prove similar to how she and James Parry had drifted apart. At first in subtle ways that go unnoticed, and then came the wrecking ball at the end of a chain, she thought.
Shaking herself from her reverie, Jessica scanned the victims' files once again. She looked up at the clock and found that time had become fleet-footed as usual. It was pushing four in the afternoon. She felt a twinge of pouting come over her, combined liberally with a dash of anger that Richard hadn't made contact. Her eye fell on Father Luc Sante's professional card which read beneath his name, Minister and Psychotherapist of the Jungian School.
Not all therapists declared themselves so openly and blatantly Jungian. This meant that Luc Sante believed in the power of the subconscious mind, that the voice of dream held potent sway over individual lives and decisions, and that-if dream therapy was right-dreams foretold, foreshadowed, and reexamined events of the waking world. Jessica knew from her own reading in the area that Carl Jung had believed dreams to be a kind of god-voice, the overseer of personal protection and good, not unlike votive god statues in primitive people's homes, not unlike praying to rosary beads or a statue of the Virgin Mary or to Christ on the cross. Jung believed the dream-god-voice to be the god of truth spoken of in the admonition “to thine own self be true.” This god was also known as intuition and instinct from within, the one voice that never lied to the individual. The voice spoke in highly charged, loaded symbols. Many of them were archetypal symbols from avatars to zoo animals, from fish, water, and womb to the death's head. Nonetheless, if the dream could be decoded as one that denied or confirmed, then the individual could safely interpret the dream one way or the other.
Jessica had never heard of a shrink who so openly displayed his basic approach to psychotherapy by exhibiting it on his business card, but then how many psychotherapists were also ministers? How many are as eccentric as Luc Sante? she asked herself. Below the name and title, the address loomed large as St. Albans Cathedral, Marylebone Street. On impulse, Jessica felt a need to really converse with Dr. Luc Sante, to delve more deeply into his feelings and hunches about the Crucifier. Perhaps his insights could kick-start the investigation back on track.
To this end, she telephoned Luc Sante, and after getting the nod from his proper, prim old secretary, Luc Sante came on the line, delighted that she had called. He had been thinking of her all day, as if picking up some psychic reading, he said and then laughed so loud it hurt her ear.
“I'd like to come over to talk about the case in more depth with you, Dr. Luc Sante.”
“Hurry over, then. I will have Janet prepare us afternoon tea. Have you had afternoon tea?”
“Well, no, not today.”
“And crumpets. I'll see we have something to nibble on as well. Delightful. Do come over. My calendar is always clear after three of the day.”
She took the cab to his cathedral under a sky that had become menacing with roiling clouds that changed in hue and expression with each passing moment. The weather had turned cooler, the light dimmer, the day more dreary, making Jessica recall a time, as a child, when she didn't understand the clock or the passage of time. She had been in kindergarten when a storm had blown over her school with the sky a charcoal black only to grow even more deeply dark. The storm had intensified with sleet and crackling hailstones; the view through the sleek, storm-blackened window had represented a hole she might tumble into, like Alice had fallen into from the story they had read that day. The sky had turned to a blackness as shiny and fascinating as the coat of a black stallion. The blackness had felt impenetrable and forever, and as a child without understanding of time, young Jessica had assumed it was the blackness of midnight. She could not understand why her father and mother had left her at school so late into the night. She feared they had left her there forever. It had mattered not a wit that all the other children and teachers were also there with her.
The cab ride over to St. Albans took her into areas of the city not meant for tourist consumption. She saw the degradation and desolation that was part of any urban community.
All of London this morning, like Jessica herself, had been seeking answers, not only to the current rash of killings. Londoners, and Jessica, wanted spiritual answers that might in some way help them to cope with the hideousness and horror that human beings perpetrated in this world. She also felt a need to find some personal and spiritual guide here in the City, where she felt somewhat disconnected as the newcomer. Perhaps Luc Sante might be that guide, like the old shaman she had met in Hawaii several years ago, the one to whom she had gifted her cane so as to begin to walk on her own two feet after having been maimed by a brutal serial killer. Now she hurried to see another shaman with a cane, seeking answers. It felt right, like a circle, like his French grandmother's saying, fin de siecle, full-circle.
Paying the cabby and standing in the threatening world that seemed to come in around her here, she again noticed the worn, gray stone gargoyles atop little St. Albans Cathedral, each blended in with its surroundings, camouflaged against the gray granite niches they inhabited. Their eyes stared cold and vacant. Their talons and teeth bared against evil, for as evil as they appeared, their ferocious demeanor portended a far worse evil, that which gargoyles historically did battle with-Satan himself. At least that was one theory set forth for the existence of the stone dogs atop cathedrals across the globe. Another said that each gargoyle represented some hideous aspect of human nature, and that this aspect had been overwhelmed and overcome by the church that struggled against the beast within mankind, finally displaying the beast in its true demeanor and ugly passions as an abject lesson to all who stare at its countenance.
She recalled Luc Sante's young, good-looking protdge, Father Martin Strand, and how he had referred to Luc Sante's psychiatric practice as the work of a “trick cyclist,” and this made her smile anew. The two of them, old shaman and new, each in the robes of the church, seemed to have a strong bond and a fine working relationship.
When entering, Luc Sante was bellowing out, “I see no damnable reason whatsoever that I should move my practice from St. Albans simply because I am retiring from the pulpit!”
Jessica could not see with whom he tiraded, but she heard the high-pitched voice of the secretary reply, “You do not, Sire Luc Sante, own St. Albans. It belongs to the church, and if the church wants you out, then you're out! Simple as that. Are you looking for an order of eviction or excommunication, Father?”
“Hmmmph!” he blew out air. “You sdll have fight left in you, you sweet old darlin', don't you? Write to the Pope, if necessary. My patients will need me whether I am ministering the gospel or not!”
Jessica tried to make herself apparent. Clearing her throat, she stepped through the open door, calling out, “Dr. Luc Sante. I've made it back to St. Albans.”
“Jessica, can you imagine it?” He waved a letter overhead, one which had been mangled. “Apparently, some fool somewhere has complained of my using church property to do my psychiatric practice! And now, with my retirement looming, they're ordering me entirely out! Like last week's garbage, like stale fish! Out! Out on the street! Do I look as if I can afford an office on Picadilly Lane or Fleet Street? Besides, all my long history of files are housed here. The work is also done here, under the same roof where I have for so many years administered the sacraments to this congregation. By God, it's my being a Jesuit priest, it is. Some discriminating old bast-”
“Careful of your tongue, Father!” warned old Miss Eeadna. Jessica noticed that the lovely painting of the parish in the wood had been taken down from behind Father Luc Sante's desk. It lay now against his desk at Jessica's knees, apparently removed by Miss Eeadna, who had also begun boxing up books, in a befuddled effort to help out. She held a few of his precious books in her hands now. Jessica noticed that the parish painting had a metal emblem inscribed “Gloucester Parish.”
Luc Sante settled somewhat at the sound of Miss Eeadna's shaky voice, but he continued pacing and speaking. “And apparently the church is somehow made embarrassed by me, by my good works… Getting bad PR flack, as you Americans say.”
“I'm sorry they're giving you grief over it, Dr. Luc Sante,” she put in sincerely.
“I bloody intend to battle.”
The old secretary gasped at his cursing, and crossed herself. “And here in St. Albans,” she muttered and
